Fortune Promoseven has poached Team Y&R’s creative director Marc Lineveldt and award-winning copywriter Neil Walker-Wells as part of its drive to raise the agency’s creativity levels.

Fortune Promoseven has poached Team Y&R’s creative director Marc Lineveldt and award-winning copywriter Neil Walker-Wells as part of its drive to raise the agency’s creativity levels. The appointment of the duo comes ahead of a major overhaul at the Dubai office under new managing director Phil Lynagh. Several high profile arrivals and departures are expected as Lynagh looks to raise creative standards and challenge for industry awards. Lineveldt and Walker-Wells have a long-standing relationship that began in South Africa. Recent work includes the launch of Virgin Atlantic’s Dubai to London route. “I see Marc as the catalyst to take our creative output to the next level,” said Lynagh. “To actually excite someone of Marc’s calibre, to get him to buy into a dream that we will make happen, is phenomenal. “This is just the first stage of our creative restructuring. We won’t achieve this overnight. “Awards are so important, so we are going to enter everything we possibly can. “I want to make sure that the market sees the creative bar being raised at FP7. If you want a serious career in advertising, we are going to show that FP7 is the number one. “I fully expect that in 2007 the market as a whole will be applauding us.” Lineveldt replaces FP7’s former creative director Jonathan Romans, who has left to start up his own agency. “I was not even remotely looking to leave Team,” said Lineveldt. “The industry view of FP7 was that you couldn’t work there because they don’t value creativity. “But Phil sold me this idea of an opportunity to do something really amazing. There is a genuine desire now to do something that isn’t really happening anywhere else. “The brief is purely to do great work. Powerhouse, ground-breaking work. We need to do work that is noticed, spoken about and completely unexpected.” Walker-Wells, who joins FP7 as senior copywriter, won a silver at the Campaign Awards for his Jock Idol ad for Radio One and was shortlisted in the young creative of the year category. Despite taking two people from a rival Dubai agency, Lynagh said that poaching was not the answer to recruiting. “We don’t want to start inter-agency poaching but it is very important that people realise that it is a growing industry and we need to let people grow within it. We can’t keep bringing people in from outside,” he said. “It is getting harder to get good people. There is an enormous amount of competition. Agency-wise it is saturated.”